President Trump

I really didn’t expect Donald Trump to win this election. Actually, when he first won the nomination, I thought Trump had a fair chance of winning, particularly since Hilary Clinton is such an unattractive candidate. But, as the campaign progressed and the polls and Nate Silver‘s FiveThirtyEight consistently showed Clinton in the lead and after all the embarrassing things that Donald Trump had said in the past came out, I started to believe that he didn’t have a chance. To be sure, there were the Wikileaks revelations, but I counted on the media not to report on anything likely to harm Hilary Clinton’s chance of winning. It didn’t seem as if the increasing evidence of her corruption and contempt for the voters would make much of a difference.

I am glad to say that I was wrong. I am not a supporter of Donald Trump. I would have preferred that just about any of the other Republican contenders had won the nomination. I voted for Trump mostly because I did not believe that a person who has apparently broken federal laws safeguarding our national security should be rewarded by being given the highest office in the country.

Why were the polls and the experts wrong? Not all of them were. Scott Adams was predicting a Trump victory even before he secured the nomination. I think that Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity were Trump supporters all along and there were signs of discontent with the nomination of Hilary Clinton in traditionally strong Democratic states like Michigan and Wisconsin which went to Trump. Still, almost all the polls consistently showed Clinton in the lead. I suppose media bias played a role. There are ways of slanting polls to get the results you want and I don’t think any candidate was been so generally despised by the mainstream media as much as Donald Trump. The media has alway been biased in favor of the Democratic candidate, but this year they seemed to lose even the pretense of objectivity. This is understandable, since if a candidate is a racist monster, the second coming of Adolf Hitler, than any means, including deception, are permitted to stop him. There may have been more than a few people in the media willing to deliberately slant the polls or lie about the outcome, for a good cause. I wonder, though, if the pollsters who depend on a reputation for accuracy would go along. Perhaps this was more a case of wishful thinking and unwillingness to go against conventional wisdom than deliberate deception on the part of the media.

The people who were dishonest may have been the people who were planning to vote for Trump. There was a stigma attached to openly supporting Trump in some places. Supporters of Trump risked ostracism, loss of opportunities, and even violence against their property and persons. There might have been millions of Trump voters who kept quiet, lied to pollsters, and then voted for Trump in the privacy of the voting booth.

I hope that the Republicans learn the right lessons from Trump’s victory. Probably the only thing about Trump that I have found attractive is his willingness to fight. Too many Republicans, particularly presidential candidates are not. They try to curry the favor of the media, even though it is implacably hostile to them. Trump treated the reporters with the contempt they deserve. When they are attacked as racist, sexist, homophobic bigots, most Republicans back down and apologize, even when they have said nothing that could be construed as bigoted except in the minds of their opponents. Trump did not back down and apologize. He kept on attacking. Previous candidates were either too nice to fight back. like Mitt Romney and the Bushes, or used to media adulation for betraying their fellow Republicans, only to be shell-shocked when exposed to the full force of media bias when they run against a Democrat, like McCain. Trump is not nice. To be sure, his tendency to attack got him into trouble when he took things personally, but there ought to be a happy medium between being too aggressive and not aggressive at all. I hope that a less flawed and more disciplined Republican candidate will be able to find that medium.

I don’t think there is much 0f a mystery why Trump won. There are a lot of Americans who feel that they have been left behind and forgotten, that the leadership of both parties have been ignoring their needs and concerns. There are millions of Americans in so-called flyover country who believe, with good reason, that they live in a country whose leaders have rigged the economy to benefit themselves at the expense of ordinary Americans. Even worse, it is becoming increasingly obvious that these elites view ordinary Americans in fly-over country with contempt. Their religion and moral are mocked in the entertainment media. Their concerns are derided as bigotry. They have begun to feel as if their country has been taken away from them. These Americans may not have liked everything Donald Trump had to say, but the fact that the elites that despise them also hated Trump must have seemed to be a good reason to support Trump. He has the right sort of enemies. The way in which the anti-Trump protesters have been acting seems to vindicate their support.

I don’t know what kind of president Trump is likely to be. I don’t think that he is going to be the unmitigated disaster some are predicting. I doubt he is going to end up in anyone’s list of top ten best presidents. He couldn’t be worse than Barack Obama has been, or Hilary Clinton would have been. We’ll have to wait and see.